Hot in the UK... but elsewhere the temperatures are off the charts
Submitted by Claire on Thu, 2025-05-01 14:40The hot temperatures on May 1st across most of England and Wales were at least three times as likely due to climate change - and you can see that on the map below from Climate Central's Climate Shift Index.
This useful tool is not a straight temperature map - it shows how statistically unlikely temperatures would be if we hadn't heated up our atmosphere, land and oceans with fossil fuels.
You can see that there are extremely abnomally high temperatures in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan and western India, South East Asia, much of sub-Saharan Africa, and Brazil.
And then you might wonder, "Why haven't I seen anything about these heatwaves on the news?" The truth is that record-breaking temperatures elsewhere in the world rarely get a mention in UK media, unless they are in southern Europe where many of us take holidays.
These records are broken so frequently that, in a way, abnormal heat has become the 'new normal'. However, this phrase is misleading if it is taken to imply that things will stay the same - unless we stop burning fossil fuels, the weather will continue becoming more extreme.